516367 - Unified Folders View, don't separate subfolders from their parent (inbox) folders (esp. for POP3 accounts)

Status: NEW

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

The current handling of (inbox) subfolders in Smart Folders view should be reconsidered.

Current behaviour:

With Smart Folders, (inbox) subfolders are not shown as a subfolder of the respective inbox, they are shown separately as a completely disconnected folder below the account's entry at the bottom.

Smart Folders
+Inbox
   Account1-Inbox
   Account2-Inbox
+Drafts
+Sent
+Archives
+Junk
+Trash
 Outbox
-Account1
   Subfolder (of Account1-Inbox)

I find that both confusing, useless and adding unnecessary clutter.
Inbox-Subfolders should never be separate from their inboxes. This would also avoid the obvious confusion of  Bug 490328 (Smart folders - unread messages indicated for inbox, but not visible because they are in subfolders [and subfolders are way out of the way, as per this bug]).

Expected behaviour:

Smart Folders
+Inbox
   -Account1-Inbox
       Subfolder (of Account1-Inbox)
    Account2-Inbox
+Drafts
+Sent
+Archives
+Junk
+Trash
 Outbox

The other advantage of this proposed design is that you may actually consider getting rid of those extra account entries at the bottom, as they don't seem to contain anything apart from orphan subfolders, and are just adding unnecessary complexity to the list of smart folders.

Comment 1

[David :Bienvenu]

I would find that highly annoying, but then I don't like having all my folders under the inbox in the first place. If you had a lot of folders, I think you'd spend a lot of time expanding and collapsing your inbox. The idea behind smart folders is to have all your special folders at the top of the folder pane, so you can easily get to them. In your proposal, if you expand your inbox with 40 sub-folders, all the other folders (e.g., Archives, Sent, other Inboxes, etc) will get pushed out of view, and you'd either need to scroll down to see them, or collapse your inbox again. Cc'ing Bryan for his UX opinion.

If there are folders you want to always see at the top of the folder pane, we've been planning on making favorite folders also show up at the top of the folder pane, so they're not buried deep in your folder hierarchy.

Comment 2

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to comment #1)
> I would find that highly annoying, but then I don't like having all my folders
> under the inbox in the first place. If you had a lot of folders, I think you'd
> spend a lot of time expanding and collapsing your inbox.

Perhaps, but it's up to me. If you make collapsed state the default, there's no difference with respect to space.

> In your proposal, if you expand your inbox with 40
> sub-folders, all the other folders (e.g., Archives, Sent, other Inboxes, etc)
> will get pushed out of view, and you'd either need to scroll down to see them,
> or collapse your inbox again.

It's only *one* subfolder in my inbox ;), and it's called "bugzilla". All mails from bmo automatically get filtered into that folder on arrival(!). I imagine I am not the only one using inbox subfolders that way. Having only inbox main folder at the top (with subfolders cut off and buried somewhere deep down) will be completely useless for such users, as their newly arrived mail will be buried just as deep and they won't see any of that in their smart inbox.

The point is: if some user decides to have subfolders of inbox, I am finding it hard to believe the same person would ever want those folders to end up in a completely diffferent place and not always together with their parent inbox. It's like those users deliberately added compartments to their big wooden inbox, and you're ripping out the compartments before proudly presenting a big empty inbox at the top level, claiming to provide "easy access" to special folders. It's no access in that case. I believe TB users are grown-up enough to create and expand subfolders at their own risk. People like David B. who don't have inbox subfolders in the first place are not forced to create them ;)
Note that you can always create subfolders at the top-level of each account (same level as account's inbox), and obviously those won't appear with top-level smart folders like inboxes. So David (and any other user, for that case) can still keep his 40 subfolders out of the way ;)

> The idea behind smart folders is to have all your special folders at the top 
> of the folder pane, so you can easily get to them. 

The "idea of smart folders" is great, and implementing this bug won't change anything about that: All your main special folders will still be at the top, you can still easily get to them, and they won't use more space when collapsed. But even with expanded subfolders, "smart folder" view will make a huge difference compared to "all folders" view: I'll still see all of inboxes of my different accounts united in one place, without any other accounts and lots of other main folders in between.

> If there are folders you want to always see at the top of the folder pane,
> we've been planning on making favorite folders also show up at the top of the
> folder pane, so they're not buried deep in your folder hierarchy.

Favourite folders at the top won't solve the problem of this bug, at all, because they'll still be disconnected from their original context. My "bugzilla" subfolder is an INBOX-subfolder of ONE specific account for a reason. Besides, with David's well-known 40 subfolders, I'm likely to get a serious space problem putting all of them to the top as favorites.

btw, the current implementation is also inconsistent in its treatment of subfolders of Inbox vs. Sent. At least with single account in fresh profile, Sent-subfolders currently have the behaviour requested by this bug. Check it out!

Comment 3

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

Subfolder handling inconsistency is Bug 516445 - Smart folders: handling of subfolders should be consistent (sent vs. inbox)
Looking at screenshot attachment 400529 [details], imagine the "sent_subfolder" would be handled like "inbox_subfolder". We'd end up with:

Smart Folders with single account (bad handling, criticized by this bug)

Inbox
Drafts
Sent
Archives
Junk
Trash
Outbox
Account1
   Subfolder (of Inbox)
   Subfolder (of Sent)

How do I tell those two apart, with their context-providing parent folder layer (sent and inbox) missing? And they might well have the same name. Say I am collecting all my sent nag-mails to mozilla in a "mozilla" subfolder of Sent, and all my incoming mozilla mails in a "mozilla" subfolder of Inbox. A more familiar example might be "work" and "private" ;)
Such a distortion of a user-defined context doesn't look like a good way of handling subfolders.

Comment 4

[David :Bienvenu]

>  if some user decides to have subfolders of inbox,

The point is the user did not decide that; the IMAP server decided it.

Comment 5

[David :Bienvenu]

Perhaps the way out of this is to handle the imap servers require imap folders to all be under the inbox as if all sub-folders of the inbox were actually top level folders, and then we can satisfy the pop3 users who want sub-folders of the inbox to appear with the inbox.

Comment 6

[Bryan Clark (DevTools PM) [:clarkbw]]

I think it would be good to take the favorite folders route as we had planned to do that and would be an alternate way of solving this and the POP users problem.  Like Thomas' use case I think there will be a statistically greater population of users who want "some folders" shown compared to those who are on the extreme end and want all folders shown.

Comment 7

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to comment #6)
> I think it would be good to take the favorite folders route as we had planned
> to do that and would be an alternate way of solving this and the POP users
> problem.

Unfortunately no, it doesn't solve the POP3 users problem, because in smart folder view, I'll never get my Inbox-subfolder to show up *below* my Inbox where it belongs.

> Like Thomas' use case I think there will be a statistically greater
> population of users who want "some folders" shown compared to those who are on
> the extreme end and want all folders shown.

Bryan, it's UNlike Thomas' use case ;)
Are you saying I'm on the extreme!? *deeplyshocked* ;)
While I see that for those IMAP cases with all-folders-below-Inbox structure it isn't ideal to show those folders below inbox in smart folders view, I am still failing to see the big problem with it because you can always keep that inbox collapsed, so there won't be any difference in terms of space.

(In reply to comment #5)
Having said which, I like David's suggestion best, as it will actually cater for both POP3 Users with custom subfolders and IMAP users with that particular structure:

> Perhaps the way out of this is to handle the imap servers that require imap
> folders to all be under the inbox as if all sub-folders of the inbox were
> actually top level folders, and then we can satisfy the pop3 users who want
> [hand-made] sub-folders of the inbox to appear with the inbox.

Comment 8

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to comment #7)

> Unfortunately no, it doesn't solve the POP3 users problem, because in smart
> folder view, I'll never get my Inbox-subfolder to show up *below* my Inbox
> where it belongs.

Or will I? When I mark my inbox-subfolder as a favorite folder, where will it appear in smart folder view?

Comment 9

[Brad Lanier]

I find the separation of sub-folders from the in-box to be not only annoying, but something that renders the smart folder mode almost unusable.  I have some sub-folders in my in-box that take incoming mail based on the sender. I do not want then as separate top-level folders, as they contain unread incoming mail, hence the need for a sub-folder under in-box.  Please correct this for in-box and any other top-level smart folders that may have sub-folders.

Comment 10

[Bill Adams]

I'm not sure if this is a new bug or not, but while I like the Smart Folders at the top, it is annoying that they do not also appear in their original form in the per-account tree. I get way too many emails at work so I have filters set up (to folders that are NOT part of Inbox). Because of the number of email accounts I have, I have to constantly scroll between the Smart Folders Inbox and per-account sorted email folders that I'm trying to focus on. I'm currently running 3.0b4.

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

is this the generic version of  Bug 516445?   Smart folders: handling of subfolders should be consistent (sent vs. inbox)

Comment 12

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

One half of bug 523164 is a duplicate of this bug. The other half I haven't fully understood yet.

Comment 13

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

I reported this bug against a POP3 account scenario, somewhat ignoring the IMAP perspective. POP3 can never have technical problem of IMAP that all sorts of folders might be technically arranged as subfolders of inbox (so for these IMAP scenarios, this bug needs a different solution, as indicated in David's comment 5). But for POP, there is no reason to inconsistently cut off subfolders in Inbox only (while we keep them for Sent etc.).

I'd recommend to solve this bug for POP accounts first and handle IMAP cases separately.

Comment 14

[Thomas D. (:thomas8)]

(In reply to Wayne Mery (:wsmwk) from comment #11)
> is this the generic version of  Bug 516445?   Smart folders: handling of
> subfolders should be consistent (sent vs. inbox)

Admittedly, this bug and bug 516445 are very closely related, but I wouldn't see them as duplicates.

I think this bug provides one good solution (esp. for POP3 accounts) for the problem described in Bug 516445. Imap might need a different solution, see comment 13 and David's comment 5 and Bug 516445 Comment 4. Solution for POP (this bug) can be realized independently of IMAP solution, so problem of Bug 516445 might still be around on IMAP even after we fix this bug 516367 for POP. Setting dependency accordingly.

Comment 15

[Charles]

(In reply to David :Bienvenu from comment #1)
> If there are folders you want to always see at the top of the folder pane,
> we've been planning on making favorite folders also show up at the top of
> the folder pane, so they're not buried deep in your folder hierarchy.

I love this idea, but is there a bug for this? I just created one (bug 1163562, before I read this), and couldn't find it if there is...